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Kia EV6 Rollaway Risk Prompts Safety Recall, More Than 9,000 Units Affected

On April 21st, the headquarters in South Korea informed Kia North America that it’s investigating a rollaway incident. The vehicle in question was an EV6, which features a shift-by-wire system. The shifter control unit may send an incorrect command to the parking pawl actuator in the event of voltage fluctuation while the vehicle is off and in park, thus disengaging the parking mechanism of the zero-emission utility vehicle.
2022 Kia EV6 7 photos
Photo: Kia
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Headquarters promptly informed Kia North America of the investigation’s results, advising the safety boffins in the United States to conduct a field action. No complaints or crashes have been reported thus far in North America, but nevertheless, the automaker has to recall 9,014 examples of the breed. The vehicles in question were produced between November 17th last year and April 7th this year at Hwaseong Plant in Gyeonggi Province.

The component manufacturer is listed as Hyundai KEFICO Corp., and the shifter control unit bears part number 42951-18150. The attached report highlights that owners of subject vehicles will be notified by first-class mail on May 25th with instructions to bring their cars in for a software update.

The remedy software prevents the shifter control unit from allowing the parking pawl to be moved out of park, therefore eliminating the risk of rollaway when the vehicle is off and in the parked position. Improved software logic was applied to production on May 3rd, one day after Hyundai introduced the remedy software for the Ioniq 5 built in the city of Ulsan.

An interesting alternative to the likes of the Volkswagen ID.4, the Kia EV6 has also managed to steal a few customers away from Tesla’s rather expensive Model Y. Priced at $40,900 excluding destination charge and the federal tax credit in comparison to $62,990 for the most basic specification of the Model Y, the EV6 can be had in single- and dual-motor flavors. The Long Range RWD is capable of 310 miles (499 kilometers) on a full charge.
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 Download: 2022 Kia EV6 parking software recall (PDF)

About the author: Mircea Panait
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After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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